


Landfill

by rizahawkaye



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Complicated Relationships, F/M, Forgiveness, Hurt/Comfort, Love, Pre-Canon, Romance, dbagjfbl their fb statuses both read "it's complicated"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-18
Updated: 2018-10-18
Packaged: 2019-08-04 03:17:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16338803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rizahawkaye/pseuds/rizahawkaye
Summary: Riza answers a call from Roy.





	Landfill

**Author's Note:**

> wrote this at the beginning of the year. i really liked it then so i'm surprised it's only just now getting its own place in my archive. i think i thought it was too short to publish here, but that's lame so i hope y'all enjoy~

Riza felt for the man. Really, she did. He spent time in the academy with guns and instructors. He earned marks for his accuracy and was taught to assemble and reassemble and assemble again in record time. Still, he couldn’t seem to hit the damn target today.

She needed him to know how problematic that was for him. For her, too, because it was her job to protect him but if he couldn’t even protect himself then really all he was doing was running her nerves into the ground. He could say all he wanted that he had his flames, but Riza knew that when it rained he was no better than a damp match. He could rub his fingers together with any touch of force and they would never spark, and then what? He’d be dead, probably. He’d bleed out in the rain. The mighty Flame Alchemist.  

How embarrassing for the both of them, truly.

Havoc voiced Riza’s concern. “You sure you passed those marksman tests, Chief?” Roy didn’t hear him. There were shots ricocheting around in the air, against the tent tops, under the arches that connected halls to the shooting range. The lieutenant colonel’s own weapon was barking off into that cacophony, but with much less precision. And, Riza noted, less confidence. She sighed.

“You’d think he’d know how to aim,” Havoc bit on the end of his cigarette. “I mean he aims that fire well enough.”

That wasn’t quite how Roy’s alchemy worked, Riza thought, but she wasn’t in the mood to explain it to Jean. She’d be met with a dozen questions, most of which would revolve around how she knew what she knew. She figured that conversation was best had between Havoc and their new lieutenant colonel.

So Riza breached the safety of the white line that separated shooters from onlookers and tapped Roy’s shoulder with the butt of her gun. He turned to her, sweat winking across his brow, and removed one muffler from his ears. Riza looked him over, and soaked in the broadness of his shoulders and the way his hair had started to fall over his eyes. He hadn’t looked quite like this even a year ago, and especially not when they were teenagers, and suddenly she felt unsure about letting his eyes sit on her back as she fired shots at the rubber target.

But she overtook the feeling and stepped under the shade of his small tent. She peered past him at the human-shaped target. There were holes in places she hadn’t noticed from her spot that was broken by a line of sunlight, but his shots were surely hitting.

Each thigh had three holes in it, all of which hit the femur and were nowhere near the vital femoral artery. Each shin was hit twice; the left arm once, and the right arm three times. Riza looked to Roy and saw more in his face than Havoc could even if he’d been the one to cross the sunlit threshold to get to the lieutenant colonel instead.

Roy’s chest rose and fell deeply, slowly. He was looking back at her, a sorry expression pulling his lips down into an ugly frown. Ugly only to Riza, who’d seen the kind of smile he was capable of, and who knew what he was harboring in those shaky hands of his. He’d avoided critical points. Whether it was purposeful or not, Riza couldn’t tell. She reached up and plucked the mufflers from his ears and fastened them to her own. In a movement that was more made from the memory of her own muscles than her consciousness, Riza lifted her weapon and fired four times: heart, both lungs, carotid. Roy winced each time, and his movements were almost imperceptible but Riza could see the jumps in her periphery. She was acutely attuned to him, even now, even after all the sand and blood.

“There’s too much at stake for that, sir,” she said, not hearing her voice but speaking low and feeling the vibrations against her eardrums. “Save that kind of mercy for the innocents.”

She ignored the way the shots against the target rang out in her mind like sirens calling to her doom. He deflated next to her and took his mufflers back, and Riza stood close as he followed her lead and pulled the trigger four more times.

-

Riza was cocking the rifle in her dreams. Always, endlessly. Her sights were set on the same dark faces each night. The ball of the lever near the scope pinched between the bridge of her index finger and the pad of her thumb, drawing a line in her periphery that she never ignored. It crept along the edge of her vision no matter how badly she wanted it to still. It seemed to come toward her for hours, the dark faces morphing from man to woman to child, and when the weapon was finally loaded her finger flexed instinctively and who she shot never differed.

It was her.

She awoke relieved and alone with a darkness suctioned to her frame every night. And this time, a phone blared where a ringing silence usually hung. She used her sheet to wipe the sweat from her forehead and stumbled to the stand in the hall where her phone lived, bumping her shin into the wooden end of her bed on the journey. She was hissing through the pain when she answered, “Hello?”

“Hawkeye,” Roy’s voice engulfed the space from the phone to her ear, and she turned the peculiarity of it over in her mind. She squinted at the clock above her stove and wondered about how long it’s been since she’s spoken to him in the dead of night.

“Sir?” her voice was deep and groggy with sleep, and his wasn’t. “We have to be at the office in three hours.”

He was silent. She heard wet sounds like a child would make when they slide their forearm over tear soaked eyes. He inhaled with effort, his breath shivering into the line. “Hughes isn’t home,” he said plainly, and Riza knew that meant she wasn’t his first choice. He must have dialed Hughes first, and when his best friend didn’t answer his thoughts had probably traveled guiltily to her. It was hard for her to discern whether that thought made her sad or frustrated, and she resolved that she was too tired to tell. Maybe she would know better in the morning.

“Or perhaps he’s sleeping, sir,” she said.

“Hawkeye, about today,” he stopped, and she could almost see his calloused hand run through his mop of hair. She was surprised by how easy that image came to mind, and by the shape it took: Roy, years ago, his arms lacking definition and his jaw still plump with childhood fat, forcing his thin hand over the crown of his head as he tried to gather himself. She felt sometimes when she looked at Roy like she was trying hard to remember a book from her youth. Something she read and reread until the paper cover crinkled, but couldn’t remember quite the same now. She’d been trying hard to reread this favorite story of hers ever since she started working under Roy, but every time she turned that first page she stilled. Fear tangled in her gut and she worried she would soil the precious boy from all those years ago. She waited now for Roy to go on, caging her breath between her ribs, worried that he was about to force her into the first chapter and through to the end, where she’d undoubtedly rather not be.

“I’m a little drunk,” he said finally. Riza sighed and shifted her weight to one foot, and flipped her hall light on. Her small space was eaten up by the white-yellow color of light until she blinked it away, and he kept up a quiet while she adjusted. Her heart started to jump uncomfortably against her chest.

“What does that have to do with today, sir?” she asked, but a part of her knew. He wouldn’t shoot the target where he needed to. She’d thought that maybe he couldn’t, but she was wrong. He was more than capable. He chose not to kill the target. Actively, with care.

And suddenly the conversation began to eat at her like a wild animal. She barely knew this new Roy, and he was calling her in the earliest hours of the morning for what? Comfort? Because he was wrestling with post-war remorse? He didn’t want to kill anymore, sure, but what did that have to do with her? A part of her screamed that he had done this to himself. He could have said no to any and all of it…but then again so could she. Why didn’t she?  _Why didn’t I?_

“Sir,” she said, and was startled by how badly her mouth wanted to say  _Roy_. “You keep using alcohol to cope and you’ll lose yourself.”

“I’m not using it to cope, Hawkeye,” he said. “I promise you.”

Another bought of silence took them. Riza slid to the floor. She brought her knees to her chest and laid her head against them, the phone tucked in between. When she felt comfortable, she said, “How did we get here?”

Roy took a stuttering breath. It was the kind of breath you take after you’ve cried until your tears stopped coming. It was what found you after you’d wracked your body until there was nothing left of it to shiver. You breathed like that when you couldn’t think to do anything else anymore but lie still and wish you loathed something more than you loathe yourself. That breath was a confession from Roy; a wordless confirmation that he hated what he’d been in Ishval, and so she didn’t need to. She was free to press her face into the crack between her knees and cry, her nails digging shallow craters into her calves.

He let her go like that for minutes that stretched until they cracked and came close to snapping, and were almost lost in the air of time. She didn’t really know how long she cried to the floor by the time he brought her back, his steadying voice breathing her name into her ear. She was only aware of the relief she felt in her core, of how liberated she was by his culpability.  _He won’t kill_ , is what he had said at the shooting range, and here in his half-drunkenness he’d told her why, and she knew she had to keep pulling the trigger but if he didn’t then at the very least she’d never have to pull it on him.

“Riza,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

“You are not a monster,” she told him.

**Author's Note:**

> now go and listen to "Landfill" by Daughter. trust me.


End file.
